AN EXCERPT FROM
US and THEM
An American Family spends Ten Years
WITH FOREIGNERS
By Bill Meara
What happens if you take an American family
and send them to Europe for ten years? In the summer of 2000, Bill and Elisa Meara,
accompanied by 2 year-old Billy and 4 month-old Maria, left their home in the
suburbs of Washington, D.C. and moved to the Azores. There they experienced the
highs and lows of diplomatic life on a small distant island. After three years
in the Azores, they spent four years London and three years in Rome. Overseas
they lived in two houses and two apartments, went to five schools, used four
different health care systems, experienced one earthquake, 9-11, the terrorist
attack on London, tea with the Queen, the election of Barack Obama… and all the
ordinary things that families go through. They lived mostly with the locals,
learned Portuguese, Italian, and a bit of Cockney, and made many friends
(foreign friends!) They returned to the United States in 2010 with a changed
view of the world. This is their story.
MOVING VAN
BLUES
DIFFICULT
DEPARTURES
“Leaving is a little like dying.” Alberto the Trastevere shopkeeper
Over time, we began to suspect that we
might not be temperamentally suited to the Foreign Service life. We found it kind of unnatural to always have
a departure date looming in front of us.
Many people live with the possibility of a move off in their future, but
for us, it was not a possibility, it was a certainty. And we always knew exactly when we would
go. Our Embassy ID cards had expiry
dates that coincided with the month that we would be transferred. Sometimes I felt like a loaf of bread or a
gallon of milk. When you met somebody
new in the Embassy, you could often catch them glancing at the expiry date,
trying to determine if it was worth the effort to befriend you.
Our suspicions about our unsuitability were
confirmed when the departure date approached. With about three or four months
to go, Elisa would start to get weepy at odd moments. The tears often wouldn't
necessarily be associated with someone we'd grown especially close to – we knew
we'd stay in touch with them. More often
Elisa would get teary-eyed at the thought of saying goodbye to someone who was
not really very close to us – a storekeeper, a cafe owner – but who had become
part of our daily routine. These were
folks we knew we would never see again.
At around this point I would usually have
what we've come to call my Foreign Service dream. In this dream, I find myself packing up to
leave the house or apartment that we've lived in for the previous three of four
years. I find what appears to be a
closet door that had somehow escaped my notice.
I open it up to find a really fabulous suite of rooms leading to a
wonderful beachfront patio... that we had completely failed to take advantage
of.
Elisa also has some recurring dreams. In one, she goes back to one of the places
that we’d lived before. She has with her
a long list of people she wants to see.
But time is short and she’s afraid that she won’t get to see
everyone. Another of her dreams is more
forward looking: in it, she’s in our new
house, and she’s horrified to find that it is full of bugs (she REALLY dislikes
bugs).
Most people with kids have a wall in their
house on which the heights of their kids on various dates are marked. “Look how much Johnny has grown since
2006!” We have similar markings, but
ours are on a piece of 2x1 lumber that goes into the shipping container every
time we move. Even in the age of cell
phones, most people know their home and office phone numbers, but by the time
we got to Rome I had so many
of these numbers in my head that I started mixing them up and blending them
together.
Leaving Rome was very
difficult. There was, of course, my
traditional pre-move injury (this time:
Achilles tendon). But there was a
lot more to it than that. Italy is such
a beautiful place, and we were leaving right at the end of the most beautiful
season – the spring. We were leaving
Europe, and going far away. Billy and
Maria had reached the point where friends were really important to them – for
the first time saying goodbye was hard for them.
Auguri Maria! -- Good Luck Maria!
Contributing to the trauma was the
Italians' love for drama. They have a
well-deserved reputation for bringing elements of theater into real life. For them, life is a stage. Also, with considerable justification they consider
themselves to be very fortunate to live in Italy, and feel sorry for anyone who
has to leave. They leave very
infrequently – for most of them it is simply inconceivable to move far away
from family, friends and good food.
(Indeed, some Italians seem to harbor a sneaking suspicion that it is
impossible to eat well outside Italy – Italian mothers have been known to pack
foodstuffs – Italian foodstuffs – when going abroad on vacation.) This all explains the bits of theater that
we witnessed each time we told someone we were getting ready to leave: Alberto the storekeeper, for example, threw
his hands down, palms forward, and, with his brow furrowed declared, “No! Impossible!
But WHY do you have to leave? You
just got here!” It was a bit of theater,
but it was reality-based theater – he really was sad to see us go. After lamenting our impending departure and
sharing the sad news with co-workers and other customers, he summarized the
Italian reaction to just about all departures:
Shaking his head slowly he said, “Partire e un po morire!” (“To depart is a little like dying” or
“Departing is a little like death!”) All
Italians in earshot put on sad faces and nodded in agreement. Alberto was right. Departure is a little like death. Your daily routine disappears. Lots of things
that you have come to enjoy will soon end.
As you get close to the end, people start treating you a bit differently
– unlike everyone else, soon you won't be around. We said goodbye and shuffled
off, dejected, en route to the great beyond.
In the State Department's publications on how to deal with culture shock, they advise
that moving back to the USA after a long period overseas can be one of the most
difficult adjustments. Their
publications on this is entitled “My Passport Says I'm American.” You are supposed to be “coming home” but you
have been gone so long that it doesn't feel like home anymore. Congress was worried about this, so at some
point they had mandated that Foreign Service personnel take
“home leave” between assignments. This
was apparently intended to keep us in touch with “home” and to prevent us from
emotionally drifting away. We found that
it didn't really work. We'd been back a
couple of times for home leave, but each visit had made us feel more like
foreigners – midway through the home leave we'd be yearning to head home… to London or Rome! Sorry about
that Congress. Nice try.
How people react when they return to the
U.S. depends a lot on where they are coming from. When you return from a long stay in a poor,
despotic, conflictive region you are more inclined to look favorably on your
prosperous and comfortable homeland. Not
long after we came back to the U.S. after a two-week stay in the Dominican
Republic, Billy and I were watching a TV report on how
dissatisfied Americans are with the direction the country is going. Billy was scornful: “What a bunch of
crybabies! At least they can drink the
tap water!” I remember an urge to kiss
the ground and wave the flag after coming back from Honduras, or El Salvador or Guatemala. But when you
come home from the prosperous and democratic countries of Western Europe, well,
being able to drink the tap water and vote is not really impressive, and the
urge to put lips to dirt is not nearly as strong.
When you go through culture shock overseas, it is
understandable: You know you have moved
to a weird foreign place, and you expect to go through an adjustment. But when you move back to the U.S. the
culture shock can be just as strong, but you can't really understand it. After all, you are supposed to be home. Even our kids seemed to know that returning
to the U.S. was supposed to feel like homecoming: During one Home Leave trip, as our plane
descended for landing, six year-old Maria – who had left the United States when
she was five months old and had never been to Chicago – looked at the skyline
of the Windy City and sighed, “Oh, it’s so good to be back!”
My first trip to a U.S. supermarket after
four years in the Dominican Republic (1992-1996) had
provided several of the little cultural collisions that eventually add up to
full-blown culture shock. First I
inadvertently took my cart with 40 or so items into the Express Check-Out (15
items or less). My fellow shoppers all
gave me dirty looks. I couldn't figure
out why until the cashier clued me in. I
tried to make amends by telling the group that I'd been overseas for four
years. The cashier wasn't buying it “Oh,
and they didn't have supermarkets where you were?” she asked. I dug myself deeper into the hole when I
tried to explain that in the DR, I'd had a housekeeper who did all the
shopping. Apparently fearing a possible
lynching, the cashier rang up my items as fast as she could. Then came a
question: “Paper or plastic?” I really didn't know what she was asking
me. I thought she wanted to know about
how I intended to pay. “Credit card,” I
responded. “Paper or plastic?” she asked
again. Genuinely confused, I told her
that my credit card was plastic. I think
by this point the cashier just concluded that I was some sort of crazy
person. She loaded my items into
bags. PLASTIC bags!
Knowing that we'd all be going through
culture shock, we decided to treat our new home as if it were
another foreign assignment. As we'd done
in all of our overseas posts, we'd try hard to keep an open mind. We'd keep track of the things we liked and
didn't like about our new country of assignment, and, as we'd done in Portugal, the U.K, and in Italy, we'd discuss the pros and
cons of the new place at dinner time.
This turned out to be a very fitting and balanced way to deal with our
new (old) posting in the United States of America.
The journey home gave us some very early
topics for discussion. The abuse that U.S. airlines heap upon travelers these
days, and the police-state treatment doled out by the TSA and the U.S.
immigration authorities certainly didn't help engender a feeling of joyful
homecoming. As soon as we got done with
the authorities (“Sir, turn off that cell phone or I will CONFISCATE it!”) United Airlines canceled our connecting
flight. We were all exhausted, but were
now doomed to six hours of waiting for the next flight. I really knew we were no longer in Italy when,
upon finally getting on-board the plane, I asked the stewardess for blankets
for our very sleepy and cold kids.
“Sorry, sir, blankets are for First
Class passengers!” Welcome home 99
percenters!
On the other hand, our experiences with
ground transportation were much more uplifting. We made several stops before
arriving in the Washington area, and in each location we grabbed cabs at the
airport. Perhaps subconsciously
identifying with their foreign-ness, we struck up conversations with the cab drivers,
all of whom were immigrants. We were
struck by the deep affection that almost all of these men expressed for the
United States and for the cities they had settled in. In San Diego and San Francisco, in Denver
and in Miami, speaking through thick accents in broken English, almost all of
them told us lucky they felt to be living in the USA, how much they liked the
city they were driving through, and how pleased they were with their new lives
in the United States. One Nigerian cab
driver really got all choked up about how lucky he considered himself. This made us feel very good about the
USA.
When we finally arrived in Northern
Virginia, having escaped the clutches of the airlines and the
TSA, we were delivered into the arms... of real estate agents and mortgage
brokers. It's a wonder we survived. But we did.
In short order we bought a house on a cul-de-sac and started to settle
down.
Moving vans began to arrive at our new
place. In addition to the much-awaited
delivery of our stuff from Rome, it was time for the State Department to return to us
the items we had placed in storage. One
batch contained items we’d stored when leaving Virginia (2000). There was another batch from the Azores (2003) that
included a full-sized swing set, and a third from London (2007). Some of our furniture had been mistakenly
sent to Ghana (where it remains – we opted for financial compensation). As we opened these weird time capsules, I
found myself wishing that more of it had gone to Ghana. There was stuff that
I’d bought when I was still single.
There was a TV that I’d had in the army. There was a
lot of baby-related equipment. When we
finally got around to selling the baby stuff on Craig’s list, they guy who
bought the crib asked how old our baby was.
“Thirteen!” I said. He looked
confused. “Thirteen months?” he
asked. “No she’s thirteen – she’s
upstairs, on Facebook.”
Following the lead of the First Family, we
got a dog. We named ours “Cappuccio” – that's what the Italians ask for when
they want a Cappuccino coffee.
Cappuccio's fur is the color of the foam. He is an English Cream Golden
Retriever. The little girl next door
(Abbey) always got confused and called him a Cream Cheese Golden
retriever. And sometimes (just to goof
with people) we'd claim that he was Spanish-speaking.
Maria's friend Cecilia taught him how to jump hurdles, equestrian style,
forcing us to buy a new, higher fence (thanks a lot, Cecilia). Thus he became
known as “Cappuccio, the English Cream-Cheese Flying Latino Retriever.”
Our kids adjusted almost immediately. At this point Maria was only eleven and Billy
only thirteen, yet they had lived in four different houses, in four different
countries – they were ready to settle down.
They loved the new neighborhood – there is a wonderful group of kids
(and parents) on the cul-de-sac and they loved the fact that for the first time
in their lives they could walk to the houses of friends, and hang out in
backyards. Billy delighted in finding things that were better in the USA. He even declared that American pizza is
better than Italian pizza. Maria
frequently tried to defend Italy – she took a firm stand on ice cream,
insisting that it was definitely better in Italy. Within days of moving to the new neighborhood
the kids effectively put the foreign part of my Foreign Service career to an
end by declaring that there would be no more of this moving-around-the-world
stuff. They were home, and they intended
to stay.
As we were trying to get settled, little
reminders of our life in Europe kept popping up. The navigator in our car still spoke with a
British accent, gave us distances in kilometers, and would instruct us to
“proceed to the motorway.” We’d reach
into our kitchen cabinet to find drinking glasses that used to be Shrek-themed
Nutella jars (in Portuguese). The kids’ smart phones would buzz with text
messages and Facebook status updates from Italy.
Our visit to the Virginia Department of
Motor Vehicles was a culturally shocking adventure in security theater. Elisa's driver's license had expired while we
were abroad, and the DMV insisted that she take a driver’s test (within 30 days
of arrival). The first obstacle was
proof of identity. There was a long list
of acceptable documents, but your options narrowed considerably if you hadn't
grown up in the United States (no “U.S. high school transcript” for you!) or if
most of your stuff (including your original certificate of naturalization) was
in a container on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. In spite of Elisa having in hand her U.S.
diplomatic passport, we struggled most of a day to convince DMV that she was
who she said she was. When we questioned
the bureaucratic rigidity, DMV staff trotted out 9-11 and hinted that
we were being uncooperative in their heroic efforts to protect the
homeland. After of a full day of this,
we finally made it to the road test... only to be told that Elisa couldn't take
the test because our rental car was in my name (on this the problem apparently
was liability, not terrorism). Horrified
at the prospect of another day of ID inquisition, we ran out and tried (one
hour before DMV closed) to rent a car in Elisa's name. No luck.
We were about to give up when I decided to try one more thing. I took a look at the people waiting in their
cars to take the road test. There was a
young Latino guy there – we later learned he was an immigrant from Honduras. I went up to
him and – in Spanish – explained our
situation. I asked him if he would lend
us his car. (For some reason, that's OK
with the DMV.) He consulted with his
girlfriend and gave us the thumbs up. Getting an assist from some recent
immigrants seemed like a very fitting way to get out of this “us-versus-them”
Catch-22. Elisa passed the test, and we
escaped the clutches of DMV with our faith in humanity renewed.
So, we had our ups and downs, but just as
in our other posts, as time passed we settled in we grew more and more
comfortable, and the place started to feel like home. And just as in those foreign places we had
lived in, in the USA we found things that we liked, and things that we didn't
like, great strengths and difficult problems, good people and bad people. This all reinforced the main lessons that we
took away from our ten years abroad, from our ten years with the
foreigners.
CONTENTS
ACHILLES
HEAL …………………………………………………1
US: SOME
INTRODUCTIONS……………………………………...3
WHERE WE LIVED:
HOUSES AND ‘HOODS …………………..13
INTERNATIONAL
SCHOOL……………………………………...48
MILITARY
MADNESS – WAR, BOMBS, AND BASES…………65
HOSPITALS AND
DOCTORS…………………............................. 98
PLAYGROUNDS,
PARKS, VACATIONS, PARTIES
(AND GOOD
DEEDS)…………………………………………….111
DEATH CHEESE,
AND CARS THAT CAN’T READ!
(LINGUISTIC
ADVENTURES IN THE OLD WORLD)…………135
SCIENCE AND
TECHNOLOGY………………………………….144
THEM: FOREIGN
FRIENDS……………………………………..156
OTHER PEOPLES’
PATRIOTISMS……………………………….176
MOVING VAN
BLUES – DIFFICULT DEPARTURES………….188
BACK IN THE
USA………………………………………………. 193
CITIZENS OF THE
WORLD………………………………………200
INDEX………………………………………………………………203
In print form the book is available from Amazon and from Lulu:
AMAZON: http://www.amazon.com/Us-Them-American-Family-Foreigners/dp/1499286287/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1403693380&sr=1-2&keywords=meara+us+and+them
LULU: http://www.lulu.com/shop/bill-meara/us-and-them-an-american-family/paperback/product-21687240.html
And it is available in e-book form from
